This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month, we're going to hear Thomas McWayne's story, Ice.

I meant to learn courage out on the ice,

to avoid the specter of cowardice by skating all the way either to Canada,

or if the icebreaker had been through to the Livingston Ship Channel.

The story was chosen by Rick Bass, whose story Elk appeared in the magazine in 1997.

Bass's fourth novel, All the Land to Hold Us, was published in August by Houghton,

Mifflin, Harcourt. He joins me from a studio in Missoula, Montana. Hi, Rick.

Hey, how are you? Good. So you and Tom McWayne are friends, right?

How did you first meet? Was it through your writing or are you neighbors in Montana?

When we met, he was down in Mississippi, where he has family.

I was living in Mississippi at the time and frequenting a shared bookstore, a Lemuria,

that we were devoted to. And just mutual friends ended up having the same publisher for my non-fiction

that he had. So just, you know, small circles. Was he supportive of your writing?

Oh, my God. Beyond supportive. He was so sweet. And at a time when a writer most needs it,

a few kind words to somebody, you know, living kind of in the outback,

that's like four years of skiing to have somebody say,

hey, I read that. I liked it. Keep it up.

Had you known his work before you met him?

I had, again, through the bookstore that really hand-sold out his work,

...